Dr Jung climbs on the couch

How comforting to be reminded that the rampant itch of sexual desire can cause as much havoc - or more - for psychiatrists as it does for the disturbed people who lie on their couches.

So Ralph Fiennes, as analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who battles with Sigmund Freud over the nature of sexual energy in Christopher Hampton's disappointing play, wears a shady moustache, sinister spectacles and the furtive, downcast air of a man fearful that his guilty secret will be discovered: he has had sex, and plenty of it, with a hysterical girl in his care.

Disconcertingly, Fiennes plays Jung not as a dynamic genius and charmer, but an icy, desiccated bureaucrat, prone to fury, lacking in energy, rarely managing eye contact with anyone.

For all the play's high-minded arguing and theorising over sexual repression, mysticism, the libido, neurosis and the pleasureprinciple, The Talking Cure is really a facile, feminist psychoromance or docu-drama, lacking Hampton's usual wit, and possessed by sex one way or another and sometimes two ways at once.

It tries to win your heart rather than grip your mind. Howard Davies' hustle-bustle production, surprisingly from such a sensitive, intelligent director, keeps slipping into the realm of the breathless Hollywood bio-pic.

Dominic Muldowney's creepy, baleful, strident score reeks of the cinema. And Tim Hatley's design consists of a wide, three-tier set, with sliding panels and mobile stairways, that is wildly unsuited to such an intimate play.

Romantic cliches regularly jostle with shrink-talk. "Don't you love me any more?" asks Jodhi May's impressively fraught Russian, Sabina Spielrein, who comes to the married Dr Jung in high hysteria, with wild, staring eyes, heaving body and shuddering tears, but stays to be all too easily cured and gladly laid. "Only as your physician," replies humourless Jung, who soon sinks helplessly at her feet: Fiennes and Miss May, though, play the sex scenes all stiff, sluggish and clothed. It's as if they can hardly bear to keep their hands on each other.

Hampton's idea, in 28 restless scenes, is to show how Jung's risky love-affair with Sabina comes to infect, disrupt and ruin his professional and personal relationship with Freud, who is prepared to condone the philandering younger man's defiance of analytic protocol.

And there's a nice, vehement clash of theories about sexuality: Dominic Rowan's amusing, wildly promiscuous analyst, Otto Gross, insists on the guiltless sexual freedom that Jung dare not advocate. But Hampton makes far too little of the crucial severing of relations between Freud and Jung. A real play of ideas at Chichester's Minerva theatre in 1992, by the Jungian biographer and analyst Anthony Stevens, made it all crystal clear: Jung's belief that there was far more to psychology than the sex instinct drove him apart from Freud....

Since Hampton's real interest is in Sabina, as a victim of exploitative males in a chauvinist society, he should have concentrated on her life. But judgment is hard to make. The production has been rent asunder by the awful misfortune of the death of James Hazeldine, who was cast as Freud and played just three previews before being taken ill. Young Dominic Rowan, all brave and resourceful, was already playing Gross and took over Freud. But for all his fluency and ease, he understandably musters little conviction as a middle-aged Viennese Jew.